Fancy yourself a comic book fan? If you've always dreamed of weaving together your own comics and image-heavy stories, but don't have the motivation (or ideas) to pursue the real deal, Halftone 2 for iPad can scratch that itch and then some. With more flexibility and features than its predecessor, this greatly improved follow-up lets you create elaborate and hilarious comics from your camera roll almost effortlessly – if you're willing to drop some green on in-app purchases, that is.

Ask any game critic to name the most important or influential games of the past decade, and odds are they’ll bring up Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. First released for Xbox and PC in 2003 (and again for Mac the following year), KOTOR instantly became one of the most revered games of its generation, delivering a sprawling, original role-playing epic set thousands of years before the events of the Star Wars films. It helped raise the bar for player choice in RPGs and bolstered fans’ flagging faith in Star Wars — and now, 10 years later, it’s fully playable on iPad.

Strategy-game developer Firaxis has made a couple of small but impressive forays into iOS territory this year with turn-based titles Haunted Hollow and Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, but it’s poised to go a lot bigger this summer. Specifically, it’s bringing its 2012 strategy blockbuster, XCOM: Enemy Unknown (which debuted on Mac in April), to iPad, iPhone and iPod touch — and we’ve had a chance to take it for a spin.

You’ll be nursing more than a bruised ego if your friends come out ahead in Bam Fu, an entertaining same-screen multiplayer game from the makers of Fingle that quickly turns into a full-contact sport. However, redemption won’t be so sweet when the novelty wears off. A free-for-all battle to turn virtual pebbles your way with kung-fu-like speed and precision, Bam Fu is best played on a full-sized iPad laid flat between a few friends, although you could get a decent two-player experience on an iPhone.

Remember Minesweeper? It was a semi-blind guessing game, and if you hit a mine, it was game over. No, it wasn’t exactly thrilling. Playing Blip Blup, a decidedly sleeker, more interesting, and modern puzzle game, it’s hard not to have Windows 3.1 flashbacks. Here you also have tiled grids that – when touched – send out a pulse wave that expands from your finger tap outward, sending color in every mappable direction. Thankfully, solving puzzles by coloring in grids is both more interesting and unsurprisingly much brainier than in Minesweeper.

Some new devices out there in the wild and if you're a gamer this week was like early Christmas to you. As we gear up for WWDC, the rumor mill is about to kick in with more "news" about everyone's favorite fruit-based tech company and they're be more tech to go around than you can stand. And Apple puts the kibosh on some iOS-powered hook ups. So let's see what the old news bag has for us this week.

It's been six years since we first laid eyes on Apple's iconic vision for the smartphone home screen, and after dozens of iterations and imitations, it looks like it's all about to change. With the public unveiling of iOS 7 just around the corner, we thought we'd make a list of all the things that we hope to see unveiled at WWDC.

In the shadow of the dearly departed Skyview Drive-In Theater, Santa Cruz's weekend flea market was another bit of my youth's paradise. Between all of the horrendous and delicious fried foods, and the empty promises of a vegetable chopper destined to make your life more convenient, the true prize would always lay between plastic, cardboard and twist-ties. Some would call them Hero Rangers, Adventure Turtles, or even Chopper Rats from Pluto, but despite their off-color paint jobs, they often could provide as much enjoyment as their copyrighted cousins. Knock-offs are what make budget-conscious world go round, and the iOS ecosystem is hardly different.

Last fall's release of the HeroClix TabApp tried to bring together the worlds of physical and digital games, letting users place specialized figures from the HeroClix tabletop game series on an iPad screen and transport them into a game. Unfortunately, while it did a solid job of recognizing the figures, the game itself was an utter mess: Painfully repetitive, both ugly and filled with lag, and lacking the strategic spirit of the tabletop source material. The brand new HeroClix TabApp Elite forges a fresh path with distinct gameplay and much different figurine implementation, but while it's thankfully a much smoother experience, the game itself still isn't strong enough to warrant the investment.

Games are a relatively young narrative medium, and plenty of them boil down to punching and/or shooting the bad guys. But wherever you find a canvas, a painter can’t be far behind to turn it into a masterpiece. The App Store is no exception, and creative minds have already used the platform to tell their own interactive stories on the ubiquitous iOS devices. We’ve compiled a list of games to satisfy the story itch, from the playful to the spooky and downright bizarre.